


Wyvernfall

by Crownofpins



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: BDSM elements, Drinking, M/M, Rough Sex, Size Kink, Under-negotiated Kink, big dick dimitri, cold times are frisky times, don't do like these idiots do, expounding on almyra, how did i forget the dimitri/dedue tag, i love cold weather ok, it's all super-consensual but still, mentions of dedue/claude, mentions of hubert/ferdinand, those always crop up in my stuff wild huh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:08:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22040863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crownofpins/pseuds/Crownofpins
Summary: In earlier days, more peaceful ones, Claude nursed a harmless, mostly-unindulged crush on Dimitri.After the war, after he's claimed kingship, after Dimitri has claimed kingship, he returns to negotiate for a lasting peace between their respective kingdoms.As it turns out, Dimitri has something he wants to negotiate too.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 45
Kudos: 357





	1. Winging Up

* * *

  
After the wyverns come south to Almyra for the winter, they court.

Their bellows turn sweet and wheedling, their scales flicker and brighten like candles being lit. The females pivot and wheel, watching, and the males tumble in the sky beautifully enough that even the most world-weary Almyran grandmother turns her wizened face upwards. They trill and chirrup and roar boastfully, and through it all they fly.

The wyverns pair as they will, sometimes with the same sex though the opposite is more common. Each wyvern has its own unknowable criteria, but when a match is made the pair abruptly swing together, slicing through the air like two halves of a set of shears. They scream their triumph to all who will hear them, dash and flare and feint and more. To test their match, his father had told Claude years ago. Claude has only seen a break happen twice in his life.

When the pair is satisfied, they cease their frivolities and begin to ascend. They climb together, higher and higher, until the set is joined as one in the shape of a small speck against the blue of the sky.

And then— they fall.

They tuck wings and intertwine their tails, their necks, and they fall. Only then, like that, turning in a graceful spiral, do they mate. Claude has watched the impossible acrobatic feat more times than he can count, and no matter how often he watches the perilous beauty, the beautiful peril, still strikes him. They fall closer and closer and closer, whirling together more swiftly, more smoothly than any flash-skirted wyverndancer in his father’s court could possibly hope to achieve. 

Just when it seems they’ll finally crash- for the first time, _this time_ it will happen, _this time_ will be- they flare their wings and they part, roaring loudly enough to shake the windows of the cities of Almyra as they do. 

They part and they glide and they never, never rejoin again.

Once, Claude had seen a pair part so close to the earth that the force of their wings had flattened the verdant lushness of the grasslands under them. From that union had come his own wyvern, Osellia, with her starshine scales and her pine-blossom throat and her cheeping, begging trill when Claude holds back a treat from her.

Claude has spent a lot of time on his back watching this dance. He loves every step of it, thrills in the displays and the acrobatics and the pairing flight, but what he loves best, what he loves most of everything, is that final plummeting embrace to certain doom and then— seemingly against every law of nature— the miraculous escape.

That says something about him, he supposes, but he chose not to be a poet-king for a reason.

One thing Claude hasn’t gotten used to about being in Fodlan, aside from the cold, is how little physical contact is made on a daily basis.

In Almyra, even the king is touched. It’s considered improper not to— he is the light toward which all others will grow, the fire with which all others will stave off the darkness. The king, his father, is cradled at the elbow or touched at the forearm, stroked on his jaw by his friends and nestled into at the waist by his children. On the battlefield his soldiers grab his shoulders, clutch his hand, lean on him when he and his wyvern sweep into the sky, taking the injured out of the line of fire. For the people to not reach for their king would be an affront, an arrogance, a display of prideful ignorance on par with a blade of grass denying that it needed the rise of the sun.

But here in Fodlan, it’s the opposite.

Edelgard uses Hubert to keep all around her at bay. At first Claude had assumed Hubert had a more intimate connection with her, that perhaps he was the jealous type. Such things aren’t unheard of in Almyra. But no— no. That isn’t the case at all, it seems. Claude had walked by while Ferdinand and Hubert were having tea one day mid-summer, and, well. There was no mistaking the early awkward thumpings of a rivalry that would coil into sweetness one day. That, too, isn’t unheard of in Almyra.

Dimitri and Dedue, too, Claude had assumed were an item. Dedue shadowed Dimitri’s steps with only slightly less perseverance than Hubert did Edelgard’s. The look in his eyes as he watched Dimitri study the lance, the sword, riding, anything— oh no. No mistaking that either. Dedue could say all he wanted about his devotion and servitude stemming from gratitude, but Claude wasn’t raised an idiot, unlike apparently everybody else in Garreg Mach.

The students in his own house keep their distance from Claude, but that he understands a little more. They all have their personal weak points, and Claude has been careful to cultivate his knowledge of those points to keep anybody from getting too close to him. He always just happens to say something that’s slightly off-putting, something that makes his classmates remember that he’s not exactly a friend of theirs. He manages to keep them at bay, manages to keep from cultivating any truly intimate connections. 

Intimacy, in his situation, brings danger.

Even so, it’s hard to see Edelgard and Dimitri being given a wide berth and not have a nagging sense of wrongness. Claude is an outsider, sure, a child among many vying for the throne, but it seems that even he’s collected some baggage from Almyra that he can’t shake.

He can imagine, in a different place, a different time, Edelgard having her hair braided by Hubert in the morning, can imagine her walking with Bernadetta on her arm to class, studying in the low light of the summer sunsets with Dorothea’s swirling chestnut waves pillowed against her knees, Lindhardt’s forehead pressed to her shoulder.

They’re all poses he’s seen his mother in, his father in, his sisters, his brothers.

It’s only natural, then, when he sees Dimitri one sticky summer evening in the training grounds rolling his shoulders and wincing, to offer—

“A what?” Dimitri looks stunned.

“A massage,” Claude laughs, shaking his head. “You don’t need to look so shocked. If you don’t want it, just say no and we can all move on with our days.”

“I don’t think it would be…” Dimitri says, trailing off. He looks thoughtful.

“Well, the offer’s there,” Claude says, grinning to hide the embarrassment turning around in him like a restless animal. Even he is subject to squeamishness about being embarrassed, though he’s much better at hiding it than the rest of his peers. “No need to get so worried about such a little thing.”

“I thank you,” Dimitri says somewhat stiffly, resuming his lunges. Claude casts an analytical eye over the soon-to-be-king as he walks to the bow rack: Dimitri is still thin and willowy, though more firmly built than Claude himself. Even so, he strikes with the intensity of a man twice his age, thrice his experience, and zero to lose. His shoulders creep broader with every day, widening like the spreading wings of a wyvern set to take flight.

Claude isn’t sure he wants to see what happens when that beast gets its fangs grown in.

They practice, unspeaking, as the light dwindles from yellow to orange and, finally, the sticky wet red of a summer sunset. 

Claude turns, slinging the bow onto his shoulder, to find Dimitri watching him.

“Woah,” he comments, falling into a comedically exaggerated stance of startlement to hide the fact that he is, in fact, surprised. He had been so focused on honing his shooting skills that he hadn’t even noticed the lack of noise from Dimitri. Stupid of him. Anybody could have snuck up on him like that. “Anything I can help you with there?”

“I apologize,” Dimitri says, putting his hands up and his big blue eyes wide as a doe’s. On anybody else an expression that beseeching would be a sign of trouble. On Dimitri, it just means trouble for Claude’s heart.

He’s got a weakness for blue eyes. So what?

“But about what you said earlier….” Dimitri rolls his shoulders and averts his eyes sheepishly.

“What I said… the massage?” Claude slots his bow back into the rack, returns his borrowed quiver and surviving arrows to their places as well.

“I… hardly mean to impose,” Dimitri says, seemingly having already spooked himself. His eyes find Claude’s shoes, his earring, his braid. “That is, if you are feeling unwilling after your own practice, I completely…”

“Don’t worry so much, your Royalness,” Claude laughs, trying not to show how eager he actually is. It might not be the most sensible thing, nursing a little crush on the future king of a country he’ll almost certainly eventually face in battle, but nobody’s accused Claude of being sensible in quite some time. He allows himself little pleasures, and admiring Dimitri when nobody else is watching Claude is one of them. “Take a seat on the bench and get your shirt off.”

“My… shirt?” But despite his uncertain tone, Dimitri obeys, sitting on the bench in the shade of the arena and beginning to tentatively work at his buttons. God but he’s sweet. He’s so trusting, so innocently docile. Claude bites his lip and flexes his hands— no, no, _that_ line of thinking is _way_ too dangerous.

“Just a pet peeve of mine,” Claude explains, stripping off his own coat and laying it slumped next to Dimitri’s now-folded white shirt. “I don’t like touching sweaty fabric.”

“An unexpectedly dainty peculiarity,” Dimitri muses, watching Claude walk up to him with those summer-bright eyes. “You are normally very- but by the Goddess, Claude! Have you been wearing your full coat this whole day?”

“Oh uh, yeah,” Claude says, pausing. He hopes it reads to Dimitri as surprise at his question instead of what it is: open ogling of his crush, shirtless and eager to be touched by him. Wow. Wow. This is what boyhood dreams are made of, huh?

“I suppose you are used to warmer temperatures,” Dimitri muses. “Where did you say you grew up?”

“Here and there in the southern areas,” Claude murmurs, distracting Dimitri by putting a hand to his chin and turning him gently to face forward. Dimitri goes with it, surprised enough by the gesture that he seems to forget entirely to question Claude’s vagueness in more detail. Haha. That’s. Definitely what Claude was going for. Definitely that, and not going for the golden opportunity to take Dimitri by the chin and move him according to Claude’s whim. 

Ahem.

“No point in a massage if you’re turning yourself into knots during it,” Claude explains, and lays hands on Dimitri’s beautiful, incredible, muscle-knotted shoulders.

He works for a little bit, and then they part. Dimitri thanks him prettily and they never, never rejoin again.

Then the war happens.

He thinks about his time in the monastery a lot these days. He thinks about Dimitri’s skin, damp and hot and supple under his hands, and Dimitri’s shoulders, lean and yet already powerfully strung, just waiting to fill in like a fruit hanging, full of promise, in the drench of the sun.

His muscles had been pulled as tight as the wings of a wyvern in flight but when Claude had touched him, had dug his fingers deep into the corded sour riptides of his flesh, Dimitri’s face had gone so sweet, so trusting, that Claude felt dizzy with the power of it, dizzy as if he and Dimitri were falling, falling, falling together. 

Claude had parted and turned before he crashed, just like always, though, and he’d glided away like nothing, nothing at all, had happened.

He thinks about that whole year at Garreg Mach more than he should, perhaps. He thinks about that whole year, and then the next five years, and then the next, and the next, a lot these days.

Especially now. The war is over, and while the commoners bury bodies and rebuild roads physical, the nobility is busy collectively burying the hatchet and rebuilding roads metaphorical.

Which is why he’s here in northern Faerghus, with a retinue and a fancier title than he left with. Dimitri’s got a retinue too, a fancier title too, and Claude can’t help but notice that they both write their titles out in the blood of their collective dead.

What he understands less, though, is why he’s here in Farghus in the middle of fucking _winter_.

It’s cold and miserable. The flight over was cold and miserable. It is _really fucking hard_ to maintain kingly goodwill when all you want to do is curl into a pile and hibernate until it is no longer cold _or_ miserable.

At least the wyverns are happy now, Claude muses, nodding seriously while some nobleman whose name he’s temporarily forgotten expounds on the nature of international friendship. The wyverns _were_ cold and miserable, but are now in one weird lizard mass in the stables while the horses eat hay from between their horns. Not his idea, but Cyril’s; a romantic part of Claude wonders if it’s his Almyran blood that makes him so good with the wyverns, even after so many years away in Fodlan. The warmth from the horses’ breath, Cyril had told him unsmilingly but not unhappily, would comfort the wyverns through the cold weather.

Claude wishes somebody would comfort _him_ through the cold weather.

It’s sunset but way, way too early for it when they all adjourn. Dimitri had been mostly silent through the proceedings, only rarely asking for clarification or calling on one of his ministers for further information. Dedue, at his right hand, had sat alert and serious while his fellow Duscur countrymen, further to his side, had taken notes with a fervency that bordered on feverish. Lorenz, representing the Alliance territories, had glared at Claude like he, personally, had killed his favorite dog. In between bouts of furious bickering and, alarmingly, the occasional rapier-like strike of single-minded sensibility, a look very like fondness had slid across his angular features.

Claude had reined his own people in on occasion, goaded them on in others, and overall had a grand old time raising hell. They aren’t kids anymore, Claude thinks, standing up and wincing at the feeling of walking on frozen toes, and he’s not about to go any softer on his classmates than he used to. 

Edelgard didn’t, after all.

“Your Majesty,” Dimitri says, approaching through the seething throng of people newly liberated from their own desperately hard and uncomfortable chairs, “I have seen to it personally that your lodgings are satisfactory. If you will follow me, I will lead you there.”

“Thanks, Dedue,” Claude says, gesturing to his guards. They read his signal on land as easily as in the air and disperse, some to mingle in the crowd and identify potential threats, others to position themselves through the corridors and watch for any unusual activity. A few men and women fall in behind him. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any extra blankets to spare in this place, do you?”

“I doubt you will need them,” Dedue says, swinging them through the crowd with the conviction of a man who expects to make a path for himself if none is given. Claude, used to slinking into spaces unwanted and making them his own, finds he relishes it.

“I’ve got pretty thin blood,” Claude says, smiling, though inside he’s thinking longingly of the sweet breath of the horses, the warm pile of slumbering wyverns, and Cyril’s little fur-piled cot he’s set up in the stables while he’s up helping with the summit.

“I understand,” Dedue says, sweeping through corridors with obvious familiarity. They pass corridor after corridor, each seemingly frostier than the last. “Being a man of Duscur myself, I recall the difficulty with which I initially acclimated to the northern winters.”

“So, extra blankets?”

“His Majesty will not let you freeze, Your Majesty,” Dimitri says, a tickle of amusement in his voice.

“Thanks, but unless he plans to wrap himself around my shoulders I’m thinking a few extra furs might be more helpfuuuuuuohgod.”

They’ve abruptly stepped outside. The constant din from the castle’s activity fades. Behind him, his guards don’t break stride. Claude, eyes watering in the sharpness of the cold, hands and feet gone very suddenly numb, mentally makes a note to give them all raises if they promise never to mention the very unkingly wheeze he makes as the cold air hits his lungs.

“You will have all you need, Your Majesty,” Dedue says, tossing Claude a look over his shoulder. For anybody who hasn’t spent years dealing with the man, it might be read as a mere glance, but Claude knows there’s a laugh there, though not an unkind one. “But please, have faith, if for no other reason but that we did once count each other as dormmates.”

“You’re my hero, Dedue,” Claude exclaims. His room is smaller by half than the others in the rear wing of the castle. No doubt some of his guards will take that as an insult, but Claude appreciates it as only a man who’s spent a winter at Garreg Mach can. The smaller the room, the easier it is to heat and the less drafts there are chewing your feet out from under you. The fireplace is blazing with warmth, his bed is piled with furs and woolen blankets, and there’s even a richly-embroidered robe lined with rabbit fur hanging meaningfully over the side of the bed facing the fire.

“I hardly wished for you to suffer,” Dedue says, laughter in his gaze once more. “Your commitment to standing up for the Duscur people alongside your own has not gone unnoticed by Dimitri nor myself.”

Oho, so it’s Dimitri in private, is it? Interesting stuff, that. Looks like Dimitri finally found the gaze directed at him, even with one less eye to do it with.

“I’m happy to lend my voice wherever it’s needed,” Claude says, repressing a yawn. “But really, I’m grateful. You’re a man after my own heart.”

“I presumed that you might prefer dinner be served privately tonight,” Dedue says, his posture relaxing into what passes for casual on his frame. “There is a private bathroom attached to this room as well. Ask your men to alert the servants if there is any toiletry you need that has not been provided. And, if you are willing, Dimitri would like to visit you this evening.”

“Sure,” Claude agrees readily, trying not to look too greedily at that warm, soft bed. Almyran beds are comfortable and soft in their own rights, luxurious and sumptuous and airy, but the capital never gets cold enough to need anything more than a light coverlet. Beds in Fodlan are a different horse entirely. There’s something special about hunkering down in thick blankets while the air outside tries to sink its teeth into you and fails. “I can think of a few things that it would be better to negotiate king to king.”

“As a friend,” Dedue corrects gently, tilting his head just the slightest. Uncertainty, hesitation. Claude smiles a little to himself— just like when they were in school together, Dedue relies too much on the iciness of his expression. If you know how to crack the code, though, he’s as transparent as his king. “Dimitri was hoping to visit you to catch up on a personal level, old friend to old friend.”

“I’m happy to have him,” Claude allows, and doesn’t think about falling, shoulders under hands, sweating, muscles flexing steel-firm, the fixed blue of Dimitri’s eyes on him, only him. “As a friend.”

“He will be pleased,” Dedue says, and this time he does actually smile.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/crownofpins) You can say hello if you'd like.


	2. Aligning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claude and Dimitri discover that they have a mutual secret.

* * *

Dimitri arrives alongside servants carrying dinner. They eat together, and Claude is reminded that one thing he does _not_ miss about the north is the lack of fresh vegetables in the winter. As with beds, though, he can’t slight Faerghus for their meat dishes. If you’re stuck eating roasted meat and roots for six months or more out of the year, he supposes it only makes sense that you’d master the field.

Dinner is a little awkward. The last time they saw each other, after all, had been in the midst of Edelgard’s war, and neither of them had done things they particularly enjoyed at that time.

Perhaps due to his own familiarity with awkwardness, Dimitri brought a bottle of thick, sticky, sweet white liquor. It’s with that aid that Claude finds himself relaxing back into the role of a man talking with an old school friend, hanging up the heavy mantle of king alongside Dimitri’s gratefully by his third little snifter of the stuff.

They soon abandon the table to luxuriate in front of the fire at Dimitri’s suggestion. Claude can’t help the groan of pleasure as they settle down on the bearskin in front of the fire.

“I thought I’d gotten used to winters here,” Claude says by way of apology, stretching his bare feet out to the fire, but Dimitri waves a dismissive hand.

“I think that to myself every year, and every year I end up rummaging for a coat before the end of Horsebow Moon,” Dimitri laughs. 

“An incredibly generous confession, my friend,” Claude says, giving a cheeky smile. “Perhaps I should see how much use I can get out of a rumor that King Dimitri is thin-blooded as a southerner.”

“Ha! I doubt that would get much traction. We have a tradition, you see…”

Dimitri starts to explain some horrifying ice festival during Guardian Moon that, perversely, involves diving. Claude privately feels vindicated. The tale confirms one of his long-held theories that a vital component of the national character of Faerghus is, in fact, masochism.

Now that they’re not in the middle of a battle or around a table making international peace negotiations, Claude finds himself appreciating the implausible transformation the once-coltish Prince Dimitri has made. His smile has a sharpness to it that it never had before, but Claude finds that it’s just as handsome as ever. His spring-gold hair is tied back loosely into a casual ponytail, and his eye burns bluer than ever, as if to make up for its twin’s absence. To say nothing, absolutely nothing, of how broad his shoulders have become, how corded with muscle his forearms are, how tall he’s become.

Claude flicks lazily through memories until he comes upon that summer evening in the training grounds. Dimitri’s shoulders had already been strong then, broad enough that Claude’s splayed hands hadn’t managed to fully encompass them. And now, if he were to press a hand to Dimitri’s shoulders, or perhaps two hands?

Ah, hell. He’s had too much to drink, hasn’t he?

“You definitely won’t catch me taking a dip,” Claude says, shaking himself from his reverie.

Dimitri chuckles.

“Perhaps not,” he acknowledges, casting an enigmatic, if fond, look in Claude’s direction. “Would you like another?” He offers the dangerous bottle up again. The liquid inside sloshes heavily, runs densely up the walls of the bottle and slides down in slivers of wet that catch the shadows from the fire and cast them up, making the glass look warped.

It is tempting. Claude usually doesn’t drink to excess outside of balls and other events, but in this case he finds he wants to make an exception. He does like the sweetness of the liquor, enjoys the bright, smooth way it slides down over his tongue and into his belly to lie warmly inside of him. There’s a curious aftertaste, too, something mineral and earthy that reminds him of the raw sap it comes from.

Claude licks his lips, then bites his lower one a little before he catches himself and stops. To his surprise, when he looks to Dimitri next his expression is- is- _covetous_ , almost.

“I probably shouldn’t,” he says, and Dimitri gives him a smile that makes his eye squinch into a pleased little curved crescent.

“Me neither,” he agrees, already uncapping the bottle again. Claude finds himself wondering how many people Dimitri has innocently drunk under the table. Given his bulk, given his nature, probably a fair amount. It would be foolish to drink further, would open Claude up to making mistakes, to becoming sloppy. To saying things he might prefer to keep secret. To being vulnerable.

Dimitri takes a drink from the bottle, straight, lifts his head back like a wolf howling, like a stag bellowing, like a wyvern roaring. Claude can’t take his eyes away from his Adam’s apple as it bobs. When Dimitri comes back up for air and the bottle comes back down, the light of the fire catches bright on his lip, on the lip of the bottle. Wetness where the two have met.

Claude reaches out wordlessly, feeling precipitously like he’s making a mistake that he wishes he’d made years and years ago, and takes the bottle from Dimitri.

Dimitri watches Claude drink. Claude doesn’t take as much as Dimitri had, just a mouthful, but it feels like the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.

“I do like it,” Claude says, handing the bottle back. Dimitri caps it and sets it aside. That done, he gives a contented sigh, leaning back on his elbows to watch the fire.

“I hoped you would. Dedue suggested you might find it palatable.”

Dedue. Right. Dedue. _Dimitri_. Oh. Oh, he’s so stupid. Claude hates himself so powerfully in that moment, watching his old crush and admiring what he absolutely, steadfastly _cannot have,_ that he can almost taste bile.

“He seems well,” Claude says, trying to work out an inscrutable way to say, ‘excuse me, I need to go feel extremely sorry for myself now.’

“He is buoyed by the progress Duscur and Faerghus have made toward each other. I wish to bring him more happiness than he has, though,” Dimitri says, and if there’d been any doubt about the nature of Dimitri and Dedue’s relationship _that_ banishes it like an arrow to the gut. Unfortunately for Claude, it feels just as painful.

“If anybody can make that happen, you can, I’m sure,” Claude forces out, and it’s to his credit that it sounds natural, looks natural. He’s spent far too long arranging this summit for his own stupid desires to ruin things. And, after all, isn’t it nice? Hubert and Ferdinand might be dead, but at least Claude’s other favorite eventual-couple had made it to that unattainable goal: happiness.

“What would make _you_ happy, Claude?” Dimitri asks, turning his head to look at him curiously. As a young man the motion might have looked coquettish; now, on Dimitri the King, it looks inviting in ways Claude has only just realized aren’t for him.

“Peace, probably,” he says distractedly, trying now in earnest to work out how best to smooth this over and give himself some, yes, peace. Peace from this beautiful man in front of him, peace from his own lonely self, peace from the writhe of humiliated anguish he’s working terribly hard to keep suppressed.

“Are you suffering, Claude?” Dimitri presses, rising up on his elbows and then his hands to turn toward him.

“Not at all,” he says, feigning a blink that lasts a little too long so he doesn’t have to think, all night, about the image of Dimitri turning toward him like that, with one hand out and his hips tilted just so. “I just- it’s dumb of me, but…”

“Please,” Dimitri says, his eye dilating just the slightest. He sits up completely to watch Claude with an alertness he would prefer not to have directed at him right now.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have had that last drink is all,” Claude says, grimacing, and if that’s the truth that’s what makes it such an effective lie. He looks to the door. “Dedue is probably waiting for you, too, and I’d hate to keep you.”

Silence falls.

The fire crackles. Wind rattles at the shutters, drawn closed against the steely gray clouds that are sure to bring trouble down on them any hour now in the form of a hard storm. Claude should get into bed before it becomes too difficult to warm by himself.

Claude looks back to Dimitri from the door and finds that he’s being studied with that covetous expression again, the glare of a wyvern assessing the acrobatics of a mate.

“Is that so?” Dimitri asks, straightening up a little more. His voice has dipped lower, gone softer. Claude can’t help but imagine that voice purring into his ear and resents himself for it. “Do you think Dedue is a jealous man, Claude?”

“Not in any unseemly way,” Claude replies, licking his lips, catching his bottom one in his teeth, forcing himself to stop. It’s an old tell, one he’s mostly trained himself out of, but for Dimitri, it seems, all sorts of sloppy old inclinations are happy to surface. He can’t meet the blue of Dimitri’s eye, so he stares at his eyebrow. Hopefully Dimitri’s lack of depth perception will keep him from realizing.

“He is in his own way, actually,” Dimitri says in a conversational tone, shifting to lean toward Claude in the manner of a man telling a pleasurable secret. “But he told me, as he suggested I visit you, that as he has me every day and every night, he is unconcerned by you and I having each other while you are here.”

It takes a moment for that to penetrate, but it’s too late:

Dimitri is kissing him, a hand raised to cradle his jaw and tilt Claude’s mouth perfectly into alignment with his own.

“Oh,” Claude comments against his lips, feeling poleaxed mostly by the fact that he’s been outmaneuvered by Dimitri the Boar King.

“I apologize,” Dimitri gasps, drawing back abruptly and with a quick shudder of breath. He has his hands resting conservatively on his thighs, but his fingers are splayed wide. He looks for all the world like he’s clutching at himself to keep from clutching at Claude instead. “I may have misread your- I may have misinterpreted… things,” he finishes delicately. When Claude still doesn’t say anything, Dimitri’s face pulls tighter, his hands contracting in on themselves to knot in his lap beseechingly. “I didn’t mean to offend, Claude, I hope you can forgive me. I- I- I don’t know what I was thinking- perhaps it was madness,” his face pulls dark and desolate as a battlefield for a moment, “or some sort of, of, of prideful-“

“Do it again,” Claude says cautiously, blinking through the fuzz that’s slowly beginning to fill his brain. Perhaps it’s from the liquor, or perhaps it’s from the sudden realization that, all those years ago, Dimitri might have assented to a massage not just because his shoulders ached.

“-prideful malfeasance what?”

Dimitri blinks.

Claude licks his lips and leans toward him.

“Do it again,” he says, and he’d put on a sexy look and do his best to seduce him but Dimitri is on him again with the ferocity and speed of a hungry animal.

He drags Claude to him with, oh, wow, incredible strength, Dimitri’s mouth flying to his own, one arm wrapping around his waist and the other clutching jealously at the back of his neck.

Dimitri kisses like he fights— the followthrough and force of his motions belie the skill, mask a finesse that can truly only be appreciated when one is at the receiving end of such ministrations. Claude finds himself opening his mouth to Dimitri without even realizing it, busy trying to keep up. He can’t help but give a sigh of pleasure when Dimitri curls his tongue into his mouth, sliding against Claude’s own in a leisurely, unfaltering rhythm that recalls nothing so much as a lazy fuck. It makes his knees weak, sparks heat between his legs, makes him think of that nice big bed behind them and nobody else in it but them. He can taste the liquor on Dimitri’s lips, at his tongue, hopes Dimitri can taste it on his too. He thinks of wyverns in their pairing flight, matching and never faltering to meet the other.

“Mmph,” Claude comments intelligently, flinging an arm around Dimitri’s neck and pulling him in again when he pulls back ever-so-slightly. Dimitri makes a noise in return, his tongue now exploring the sharp ups and downs of Claude’s teeth, perhaps chasing the sweetness of their shared bottle.

He feels Dimitri shift before it happens, and so this time he’s prepared: he flexes his belly, his legs, lands on Dimitri’s lap like he’s launching onto wyvernback. He feels Dimitri’s hands slide to his thighs and run covetously over the steely muscles there, and then one hand goes back, further, to give his ass a hard squeeze. Claude flexes tight and hears, feels Dimitri’s approving snort. Claude breaks away from their kiss to toss his head and finally lower himself onto Dimitri’s lap firmly. The hand still on his ass squeezes again. It almost hurts, but in a pleasant way.

“Like what you see?” Claude knows he does. Dimitri’s eye has gone wide and black, his cheeks have gone pink. Claude’s been _pulled into his lap_. The revelation— that his crush, his boyhood Adonis, had been privately harboring his own feelings toward Claude— is heady. Far more than the alcohol, really, it intoxicates him, the idea of Dimitri going back to his dorm thinking of Claude, Dimitri lying in a cold tent before a battle thinking of Claude, Dimitri talking about Claude with- Dedue?

Hang on.

“Wait, you said _Dedue_ suggested-? What exactly does-”

“He _also_ said you would probably try to overthink things,” Dimitri says with an arch of his brow, licking his teeth like a cat who’s just been fed a fish and is thinking of one more, please, “and I’m inclined to agree with him.”

“We can’t all just punch through walls,” Claude objects. They’re not _wrong,_ but he’d like to know the particulars. What had Dimitri said to Dedue? What had _Dedue_ said to Dimitri? What exactly did-

“Claude,” Dimitri says, his voice gone low and rough, his lips soft and slightly wet still in the firelight from their mouths joining, “do you want to take or be taken?” And he rolls his hips, letting Claude feel the thick, insistent press of his own arousal through his pants.

“Uh,” he says, his line of thought so effectively severed that for several moments all he can think about is the fact that he’s sitting on Dimitri’s rapidly hardening dick, “let’s figure that out in a bit.” And he blinks, and rides another roll of Dimitri’s hips, and thinks of wyverns flying in tandem, stretched out wide and wild against the sky above him.

“Good,” Dimitri says, smiling with a peculiar tip of the chin up that is both incredibly attractive and a bit arrogant. Perhaps, Claude thinks, it’s one because of the other.

“Give me another kiss, though, hm?” Claude says, tilting his head and giving a half-smile with only a little teeth, because two can play at that game. When Dimitri leans in Claude puts a hand up to his mouth, pushing gently backwards. 

“Ah-ah,” he says, enjoying the way Dimitri’s brow furrows with frustration even as he obeys, “how about here, now?” Raising one hand up, running it along his chest until he finds the topmost button, he pops open his shirt and bares just the faintest sliver of skin at his throat.

Dimitri kisses the hand over his mouth, letting his lips linger so that the heat spilling from his mouth warms Claude’s fingers. After a moment of deliberation he takes that hand in his own, draws it to the side, and then leans in to rest his lips, very gently and delicately, at that minuscule sliver of bared skin. He draws back and fixes his eyes on Claude again, expectant. _More, please._

“And how about here,” Claude says, reaching up again slowly, trailing his hand over his chest and wondering if Dimitri can hear the hiss of skin over silk like he can, to languidly, luxuriously undo another button. He lifts a single finger to tap at his skin.

Dimitri’s mouth curves up into a half-smile as, again, he leans in and gives Claude a very petite, very chaste press of the lips on the newly-bared skin. It could barely be called a kiss, not after Claude has had Dimitri fall ravenously to his lips.

Finally Claude gives himself a genuine gift- he loops his arm around one of Dimitri’s shoulders, oh, his beautiful incredible broad shoulders, and heaven and earth around him if they aren’t the most incredible set of shoulders he’s ever felt. He’s dreamed of these shoulders, even when sometimes the dreams were nightmares of Gronder Field. Mostly the dreams were not, though. Mostly the dreams were: him with hands pressed open and honest to Dimitri’s skin, to Dimitri, Dimitri.

Claude feels momentarily dizzy and thinks that perhaps it’s the drink finally hitting too strong after all, but it’s just another lazy raise of Dimitri’s hips throwing him off. He rides out the motion, feels Dimitri’s other hand come up to capture a thigh once more.

“And here?” Claude says, peeling open another button.

“I grow impatient,” Dimitri says, though he doesn’t look unamused. Claude taps his collarbone meaningfully, this time with two fingers.

“Well?”

“Did you ever know,” Dimitri says, shifting thoughtfully once before putting both of his hands under Claude’s thighs and sitting up, holy shit, and then _standing_ , making Claude grab desperately for his shoulders unless he wants to fall over backwards, “how often I wished to tell you of my- my admiration, in our school days?”

“Admiration,” gasps Claude, swallowing, looking down and then up again, locking his thighs to Dimitri’s sides as if he is in fact a wyvern Claude is about to ride. Well- _well_. Supposing he is, in a fashion. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”

He’d forgotten, impossibly, how strong Dimitri is. He’d forgotten that it isn’t just some battlefield quirk, a crest ability activated by danger. More importantly, he’d forgotten just how _hot_ that is.

“Do you remember the summer evening when you and I were alone in the training grounds?” Dimitri asks, as if Claude hasn’t etched every fine detail of that evening into his memory like a revelation from the Goddess. He looks down at Claude, appreciation lit nakedly on his face in the closeness, the comfort of the fireside.

“Hm,” Claude says, because it wouldn’t do to give away his secrets, would it? “I think I do, yeah. I can walk, you know.”

Dimitri turns and starts to walk them to the bed, moving as easily as if he’s carrying a letter, not a fully-grown adult man packed with enough muscle to ride a wyvern and shoot a bow at the same time. Claude tries not to squirm, very conscious indeed of the fact that Dimitri is between his spread, tensed thighs. He can feel the jut of Dimitri’s interest against him as they move away from the fire.

“I prefer this,” Dimitri says very casually, hands tightening on Claude’s legs where he holds him still. “Do you remember that I declined at first? That summer, I mean.”

“Oh yeah,” Claude says, feigning casual interest, watching the bed get nearer and nearer, feeling his pulse quicken as it does. Dimitri will sit, and Claude can push him down, regain his feet under him, and then—

“Do you know why, Claude?” Dimitri asks, turning in a quick swirl that feels more like a turn on a dance floor than the movement of a soldier famous for his uncompromising force. Claude watches the room shift behind him as he realizes that he’s the one about to be on his back.

“I presumed you were just shocked at the audacity,” he fires back, flashing a grin that Dimitri doesn’t return.

It isn’t that he’s opposed to being under Dimitri tonight. Not in the least. But in Almyra, he’s always been the one taking his partner. As the king, there simply isn’t any other way it can go— it’s just the way it is. He can have all the lovers he wants, and there are plenty of people who are happy to fall into his arms for the pleasure of it alone. But one thing is absolutely non-negotiable: the king is the one to give pleasure, and his partner, whoever is it, is the one to receive. Would the sun receive strength from the grass it shines upon? 

Claude hasn’t seen any point in bucking the trend. As constraints go, that one feels so minor as to be almost unremarkable. The king bestows and the lover receives; what problem is there with that?

It occurs to Claude, though, that Dimitri and he are _both_ kings. Even if somebody in his guard leaks to the senate that he’s been making the two-backed beast with the king of Unified Fodlan, so what? They have no grounds to object on. And Claude has the roster for his guard rotation while they’re here memorized… It’s a good way to smoke out leaks, now that he thinks about it. He’s been suspicious of a few guards for a while. Better to identify them on something unimportant like this rather than being caught flat-footed later on when something big comes up. Now, who’s guarding the door currently? Danisa and Hectel, isn’t it?

Claude is so busy spinning a web inside his own mind that he almost misses it when Dimitri tosses him onto the bed.

“Oof!”

“Claude,” Dimitri says seriously, putting his chin up to start undoing his outer jacket, the one that goes all the way up, trimmed with fur, to frame his throat, “Be here with me now.”

Something about how he says that makes Claude blink. There’s a weight to his words, a ghost or an echo, like the hum of a string after the sound has faded but the movement remains. He wonders if Dedue has said those same words to Dimitri so many times that he’s worn the words in Dimitri’s throat into his own voice.

“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head and putting a hand to his forehead. “Bad habit. Uh… yeah. I just assumed you were offended, or flabbergasted, or something like that. On the training grounds, I mean.”

“Flabbergasted, hm.” Dimitri finishes, laboriously, with the buttons of his coat and peels off the layer, revealing an embroidered shirt below. It has an enormous amount of lacing but no buttons. It makes sense, Claude realizes, due to Dimitri’s stiff hand. “I suppose that’s close.”

“You were… astonished by my boldness, and were struggling to keep from flinging yourself into my handsome, welcoming arms,” Claude guesses, letting a smile creep across his face to make it clear he’s joking. He shifts to sit cross-legged on the bed, watching Dimitri peel himself out of his own clothing.

“Who wouldn’t have,” Dimitri says quietly, keeping his eyes down.

“You went back to the dorms that night and dreamt of passionate nights spent with yours truly!” Claude laughs, shifting and giving a little bounce to test the mattress underneath him. The bed is soft and, as Dedue had promised, practically emanates comfort. Between the bed and the person about to fuck him in it, Claude realizes that he _really_ owes Dedue.

“That night and others,” Dimitri agrees, stripping off his overshirt to reveal one last undershirt, with another girdle-like half-shirt underneath. The obsession with layers in Fodlan is really something.

Claude stops laughing.

“Wait, really?”

“Well,” Dimitri says, rucking off his final layer to reveal a chiseled torso strung wrapped up in shining ribbons of scars. His hands go for the laces of his pants. “We were young. Are you intending to share a bed with me in your full diplomatic uniform, Claude?”

“Oh. No.” Claude unslouches, shaking his head at himself, and begins to unbutton, unpin, and unchain his own jacket. This far from the fire, he finds that he moves more slowly than Dimitri, not eager to expose himself to the chilled air of the castle.

“I suppose it’s foolish of me,” Dimitri comments quietly, sitting down on the side of the bed to unlace his shoes. Claude’s own boots are neatly lined up next to each other at the entrance to the room, to the left of the door. He’s never liked the idea of wearing shoes inside a living space. “To have harbored such a long-standing sweetness toward you is… I hope you won’t think it too odd of me.”

“No,” Claude says, startled enough that his voice cracks. “No, I don’t think so. I-“

Dimitri looks up at him suddenly with that brilliant blue eye. He looks so hopeful, so vulnerable, so sweet and gentle and somehow, despite the raw power that’s carved into every inch of his body as if with a ragged-edged chisel, dainty.

Claude reaches out, half-escaped from his own jacket, shivering slightly in the chill, and feels his heart tremble when Dimitri puts his cheek trustingly into the palm of his outstretched hand.

He’s always had such a weakness for blue eyes.

“I always had something for you too,” he confesses, feeling uncertain about laying those cards on the table. He’s used to keeping himself tightly wrapped up by now, used to stacking layers of meaning in each word and hiding himself in those layers. He’s grown so used to wearing those extra barriers between himself and others, at this point, that it aches like a wound uncovered, leaves him feeling a little frightened, to speak so plainly and honestly. “I thought of you often. That year, and… others.”

“Claude,” Dimitri says, and then doesn’t say anything for a moment because Claude is stroking his face, running his fingers with the thick bowstring callouses up and down the sharp line of his jaw. He closes his eye and sighs, clearly relishing the sensation.

“I’m freezing,” Claude says, half-surprised to find that he is in fact starting to tremble a bit.

Dimitri’s eye flies open to inspect him.

“You don’t even have your jacket off,” he says with disbelief. He still keeps his face where Claude wants him, but his brow has furrowed up with concern.

“I’m a southern boy,” Claude says, pulling back and releasing the spell, whatever kind it is. “I grew up in Almyra, and the hot part of it.” Nodding in understanding, Dimitri turns his attentions back to his pants and, moments later, starts to shimmy them off. Claude watches idly, almost unwillingly peeling off his own outermost layer. Then, as if on autopilot, he pulls off his undershirt and stops where he is, staring vacantly. 

Dimitri has gotten his tight-laced pants and briefs off in the same impatient push and turned to Claude. His back is to the fire, his front to Claude. He’s framed in heat, in fire, and with the ochre of the fireplace illuminating his hair he looks like a legend, like a secret, like a revelation handed down to the earth by the sun itself. The scars on his body clutch at him jealously, some fresh-mottled dark as dusk and others shiny and glossy as stars in the night, all of them clean and sharp as only blades can be. Tonight, though- 

(Claude licks his lip, bites it, watches Dimitri watching him)

Tonight, though-

(Dimitri crawls onto the bed on his hands knees, paying his jutting cock no mind as he reaches out)

_Tonight_ , though-

(He strips Claude slowly, his mouth lingering on his collarbone, at the nape of his neck, the swirl of one of Claude’s own scars wrapping complicated and messy around one arm, Dimitri’s hands pressing hungry at the small of Claude’s back, the narrowness of his waist, to bear him down under the weight of him and down into the cold bed that gives like the world before them)

Tonight, though, Dimitri is _his_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops now it's going to be three chapters I promise this isn't going to turn into another beast of a fic
> 
> Thank you for reading and your kind comments and kudos! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/crownofpins)!
> 
> ... Hey Dedue, what exactly is your aim in all this?


	3. Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claude gets what he wants, even though he didn't know he wanted it until, suddenly, he does.

Dimitri pulls the blankets over them with a satisfied huff, letting Claude pull him down into his arms once they’re weighted down by it all.

“Cold,” Claude complains, slotting his legs between Dimitri’s and burying his face in the junction of his neck and his shoulder. The bed will be warm soon, probably warmer once they get to it, but right this second everything is so cool and crisp as to be painful. Claude is still trembling a little from the chill.

Dimitri laughs, low and heavy, making his belly tense and his chest rock slightly above Claude. He thinks he should probably be annoyed by that, but Dimitri laughing is still a rarity, a precious luminous feather fallen from a jewel of a bird. Claude can’t find it in him to begrudge him a little laughter at his expense given that.

“Laugh it up,” he murmurs into Dimitri’s ear, lifting his face from the crook of his neck to do it, letting his breath steam up hot and warm between them, “go on, laugh and see if I forgive you for it.”

This time it’s Dimitri’s turn to shiver.

“Should I beg?” He asks, his lashes sweeping down to shade his ice-bright eye, his voice simmering low. “What should I do to convince you of my sincere repentance, Claude?”

Claude walks his fingers up Dimitri’s back, letting his palms slide warmly behind them. Dimitri drops his head, rucks his shoulders up, buries his face in Claude’s chest. He breathes in slowly and the heat his mouth raises on Claude’s skin makes him want to squirm, makes him want to bury himself together against Dimitri, twining closer and closer until there’s no space at all between them, just heat and skin, no space at all.

“Warm me up,” Claude says thickly, not letting his hands off of Dimitri.

“Yes,” he says with warm, pleased obedience. That almost brings a prickle of tears to Claude’s eyes, unexpectedly, because despite everything they’ve done, everything they’ve seen, despite the blood and the death and the ghosts pulling sharply at both of their heels, that kind, gentle core that makes Dimitri who he is has made it through the war intact.

He thinks back to Dimitri on Gronder Field, ragged and mad and streaked in blood and soot and fury, and he slots that man over the one leaning in to kiss up Claude’s chest. One and the same, Claude knows. That man hadn’t been a surprise to him then, though. He’d always known something wild, something sharp and dangerous and brutal, was lying under Dimitri’s skin. Rather than dampening the appeal of his sweetness, though, Claude had always found that looming shadow to add to it. Dimitri being kind was a choice, not a thoughtless action. He knew other ways to be, ones staked in shadow and stinking of blood and rot. He preferred the path that led his schoolmates to happiness, to safety. To peace.  
  
To life.

“Claude,” Dimitri says, gently curling a hand in his hair and pulling his head back, slow enough to get his attention but hard enough to keep it, “be with me here. Be with me now.”

Claude opens his mouth to say something— an apology, perhaps, or a deft sidestep that calls Dimitri’s attention elsewhere— but all that comes out is a throaty, breathy moan as Dimitri bites him on the side of his neck.

“I’m here,” he says instead, wetting his lips, his lashes flickering, his thighs tensing. He feels as if he’s been jerked back into his body by force. Now that he’s here, he realizes how heavy Dimitri is over him, how effectively he’s pinned. 

“ _Stay_ here this time,” Dimitri says, his chest rumbling with every word. Pressed this close, Claude can almost feel his voice before he hears it.

Dimitri has straddled his thighs, his legs caging his own in. His spare hand is running up and down Claude’s side, fingers touching at each strut of his ribs and muscles as if counting. The hand in his hair is only tightening, leisurely drawing his head back further and further as Dimitri sweeps slow presses of his lips, of his tongue, of his teeth to Claude’s neck. He bites just hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to keep Claude focused on him, but not hard enough to make it ache.

“Dimitri,” Claude says, flushing and staring at the crown of golden hair that is all he can see of the other man right now, “hang on, don’t just- you can’t just bite me to pieces. We still have work to do,” he finishes, carding one hand up into that lion’s mane and marveling at the thickness of his hair, the heaviness like silk from the best spinning houses in Almyra.  
  
“People will see the marks at the table tomorrow,” Claude continues, and then gives a sharp cry and finds himself struggling against Dimitri, because he’s being bitten more sharply than before, and this time Dimitri is sucking against his skin hard, locking his body down against Claude’s and forcing him to stay still under him as he does it. The heat of his mouth on him and the press of his body makes Claude moan, makes him fight and buck and revel in the struggle even as Dimitri rocks his hips down to better pin Claude, tightens his legs and his belly to press him down unforgivingly into the soft mattress.

As suddenly as he’d struck Dimitri lets go, dropping Claude from his jaws with a pleased murmur. He pulls back, tilting his head this way and that to survey his work. With one eye, he has to turn his head more extremely to see his work. The effect is of being surveyed by a wyvern dubious of the turns of a displaying mate.

“It’s below the line of your shirt,” Dimitri tells him with gravity, the hand in Claude’s hair slipping loose to trail down his neck. Claude shivers and swallows when Dimitri’s thumb plays at the spot he’d just savaged. He wants to lay like this, wants to let Dimitri bite his lion’s fangs into every inch of his skin, and the instinct spooks him. Dimitri isn’t his to have. This isn’t his to have; he’s got no right to wear Dimitri’s marks on his skin. The ache of that makes Claude force his way up, and to Dimitri’s credit he has the good sense to make room for him as he does.

“How would you know?” Claude demands, taking his hands off Dimitri to bring them to the spot at his neck. His voice has gone sharp. 

It’s one thing to tempt his guards into betrayal with potentially juicy gossip. It’s another _entirely_ to enter into negotiations tomorrow bearing a mark of teeth at his throat for all to see.

“I was looking,” Dimitri tells him with somber sincerity. “All day I was looking at you. And before that, of course, in school, I looked. I know how you wear your clothing,” he finishes, ducking his head and looking contrite.

Claude closes his eyes in irritation, letting his fingers explore. To Dimitri’s credit, he seems to be correct. If Claude wears anything but the most extreme V-necked shirts, inappropriate if not outright insane to don in Faerghus winters anyway, the mark will be hidden. The fall of his collar will press at it, though. Make it ache a little. Make him remember Dimitri pressed over him, holding him down, his teeth set into his skin.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Dimitri says, his eye flashing wild with bright worry. “I should have asked.”

“Probably,” Claude agrees, biting at his lip and this time not bothering to catch himself at it. He casts his eyes down. “It’s fine. Just nothing visible, Dimitri.”

Dimitri reaches out and catches his chin, raises it up so Claude and he are looking at each other.

“If you wish me not to set my teeth on you, I won’t,” Dimitri tells him. “If I said it was the drink spurring me on, or your cries, or the way you moved against me, all of it would be an excuse. I apologize. I do wish for you to enjoy yourself. With- with me, I mean,” he says, and suddenly he’s the one coloring and dropping his gaze. “I apologize.”

Claude sits there in silence for a moment. The cold of the room bites at his back, his chest, his arms and his shoulders and his spine where he’s bare. Dimitri has pulled away but his legs, curled now, ride at Claude’s hips and thighs. The weight of him is as delicious as the liquor they’d shared earlier. The bite at his neck aches pleasantly. He wants another one and another, hazy bruise after hazy bruise to remind him sharply of what they’ve done here long after the night has passed. But he can’t get the words out, can’t get them to surface from the murky depths of his own convoluted, root-bound thoughts. 

He can’t wrest his own iron grip on his self-control away from himself for even a moment, can’t even seem to trust Dimitri enough to know better than to leave him visibly marked. In retrospect, it’s absurd. Dimitri has been a king for long enough now to have accumulated a reputation for being careful and judicious. And, anyway, as a friend, he’s always been honest and true, hasn’t he? To a fault.

So— so, if Claude has assented to be the one receiving Dimitri, how does he expect _that_ to go if he still snaps for control at the merest hint of its loss? Claude feels frustrated at himself, frustrated at the repentant face Dimitri wears because of him. He reaches up and runs a hand over the scar cutting through Dimitri’s shoulder, trails his hand up to rest at Dimitri’s neck, trails it down again to brush lightly over one pectoral so exquisitely-carved as to be from marble. Dimitri shivers but holds, obediently, still. It’s clear he’s waiting with patience for Claude to signal his ease again.

“It’s all right,” he says, swallowing. “It was,” he says, and swallows again. “You can do it again if you want.” Where has his silver tongue gone now? It feels like he’s tripping over himself, made clumsy by Dimitri’s own graceless charm.

“Ah,” Dimitri says, his expression turning considering. He looks at Claude very carefully, eye searching his expression, and Claude tries not to let his own internal conflict show on his face.

Dimitri is trusting, Dimitri is gentle, Dimitri is kind, but Dimitri is no fool. He sees something in Claude’s face and it makes him stay back, makes him continue to give him space even as Claude’s skin turns chilly and goosebumps start to raise on his arms. His distance isn’t unfriendly, quite the opposite. Claude can still feel his eagerness, the hungry attention he’s barely leashing. But Dimitri still stays back with the air of a dance partner waiting for an invitation.

How, exactly, does Claude extend that hand?

It occurs to him, as they sit together, that Dimitri’s charm point for Claude is the contrast between the violence he’s capable of and the gentleness he conducts himself with. So then, what is Claude’s charm point for Dimitri?

“Hey,” Claude says, lying back down and sprawling his arms up, letting his hands spread to cushion his head against the pillows. “What exactly is it about me that you like, anyway?”

Dimitri blinks, tilts his head. Tentatively he lowers himself down again, reaching behind himself to pull the blankets back up over them. Claude gives a pleased sigh, more than ready to be warm again. Dimitri runs his hands over his arms slowly, thoughtfully, chasing away the chill.

“You are… handsome,” Dimitri says slowly, touching at his tight waist, fingers lingering on an undulating scar he’d gotten from a barbed arrow. “Of course, you are beautiful.”

“Did you ever notice how good-looking all our classmates are?” Claude muses, quirking an eyebrow. “What’s up with that? What are the odds?”

“The way the sun catches on your skin sometimes,” Dimitri says, ignoring him but nicely, somehow, “paints you in gold, as if you were a manuscript illuminated by the monks.”

“Geeze,” Claude laughs, resisting the urge to preen. “Mr. Poetry here.” He shifts his legs, runs one of his feet up and down Dimitri’s fuzzy one. They don’t wax or shave here, either, not the men nor the women, despite the preference for little to no facial hair. That took some getting used to too, Claude can say that for certain.

“Of course your intelligence is great,” Dimitri continues, smiling slightly wryly, “but I would say that what always struck me most about you was your curiosity.”

“Okay,” Claude says, squirming, winking, feeling like they’re dangerously close to the same threshold he’d tiptoed over before with the bite. “Awfully nice of you to say. No need to sing my complete praises, you know, or we’ll be here all night.”

“Probably,” Dimitri agrees, one hand sliding down to cup the faint curve of Claude’s hip. He thinks of Dimitri squeezing his ass, flexes a little. Dimitri smiles at him, leans down, kisses him. He kisses Claude more slowly this time, more leisurely, lets him lead. He opens his mouth for Claude with an obscenely sweet moan, groans when Claude twine his tongue with his own lazily. He starts to rut slowly against Claude, keeping the same slow tempo Claude has set if not the lightness of his touch. Claude gasps against his mouth, breathes out in a slow shudder that seems to encourage Dimitri to crowd closer to him. 

“I think the thing about you, Claude, that I admired so,” Dimitri says, dragging his mouth away with a turn of his head to press wet, open-mouthed kisses to Claude’s cheek and even his beard, letting Claude do the same to him, “is that you always worked so hard to please people. You were always practicing, night and day.”

_Hey_ , Claude thinks, but Dimitri is kissing him again, curling his tongue into his mouth and leaving no room in his head for anything but that for a moment. When Dimitri breaks away again, Claude finds himself gasping for air. They’ve both fallen into an unconscious rhythm, an aimless back-and-forth frot that sends small sparks of pleasure singing up Claude’s nerves. Dimitri looks blissed out, his eye fallen half-shut, his lips flushed and wet and swollen from Claude. The thought sends a surge of want, of need, through him. He wraps one arm around those beautiful rugged shoulders again. He finds himself enjoying the slow, flowing motion of muscle under his hands almost as much as he’s enjoying the sparks of friction between both of their cocks as they rut.

“Now you’ve come back,” Dimitri says in between gasps, shifting to splay his knees and plant his hands so they’re pressed more tightly together again, “and it seems you’ve only become more artful at pleasing those around you. Claude,” he bursts out, suddenly passionate, eye gone wide. He’s so awkward sometimes, Claude thinks to himself fondly, lifting a hand to pet clumsily at the back of Dimitri’s head, being careful not to loosen the eyepatch if only because Dimitri himself hadn’t removed it.

“Yes?” He asks, wracking his brain to remember if he’s ever been so amused and aroused at the same time.

“When was the last time you tried to please yourself?” Dimitri asks, his pupil tight and black, his iris blue as a summer sky. Claude finds he can’t look away, can’t stop moving with him. He’s caught, pinned like a butterfly to a collection board under Dimitri’s unintentionally fierce stare, his guileless sincerity.

He can muster an awkward laugh, though, so he does. “I presume you don’t mean self-satiation. Anyway, I thought we were supposed to be getting into each other’s pants, not each other’s heads.”

“I suppose,” Dimitri allows, slowing the rock of his body against Claude’s. Claude grits his teeth. He wants more, not less. “It just seems that you keep becoming distracted. I cannot help but wonder why.”

“I’m fine,” Claude says so easily that it clearly even sounds like a lie to Dimitri.

“What do you want?” Dimitri asks, stilling altogether and bracing himself up again. Claude gives a stifled groan of frustration.

“I thought it was pretty clear,” he says, dragging his nails lightly down Dimitri’s back, trying to get the point across. He arches and tips his hips up, brushing Dimitri’s and his erections together pointedly. The angle is wrong and the distance is too far for any satisfying contact, but it’s a pleasant enough feeling that Claude does it again. Dimitri lets out a heavy breath, swallows hard, but remains still. While it isn’t the easiest maneuver he’s ever done, at least it’s _something_ : he keeps at it.

“You keep me at bay,” Dimitri says thoughtfully, shifting his weight. Claude freezes. Dimitri tilts his head, still thinking, still looking down at Claude. “You keep trying to put distance between us. Do you want this, Claude? To be here, to be with me?”

“Of course,” he says through a suddenly dry mouth, feeling rather like the rug has been pulled out from under him. Dimitri seems to be good at that tonight. “Of course I do.”

“Then why are you forcing me back?” He asks, narrowing his eye in contemplation.

“I’m,” Claude says, but the lie stalls in his throat. He feels like they’re falling dangerously out of sync, faltering from their earlier perfect parallel. Dimitri is right: it’s because Claude is banking too hard, turning too wide, refusing to close the distance. He’s falling dangerously out of sync, and if he lets this falter now, he knows that Dimitri will give him the space he’s unintentionally fighting for. Dimitri will plummet down and away and Claude will be left wanting, waiting, wishing he’d done better. “I’m a little nervous,” he admits, feeling very suddenly out of control. He fights with himself, tries his best to keep his wings straight and his spine strong.

“About what?” Dimitri swings off of him, and while Claude thinks he should feel disappointed, he actually finds that he likes Dimitri next to him better just at this moment.

“I don’t really know,” Claude says, turning on his side to face him. “I… what is this, with Dedue and you and me? Give me a straight answer for once. I don’t understand what’s happening here. It’s distracting me.”

Dimitri spreads out an arm, uses it to gather Claude to him tightly. He tucks his knees to Claude’s, puts his face down into Claude’s hair. He inhales, exhales, kisses his temple. Claude shuts his eyes, luxuriating in the attention.

“Dimitri, knowing my feelings toward you, proposed that I, um, woo you,” he says, which makes Claude give a resigned laugh, because the King of Unified Fodlan can’t seem to say _seduce_.

“I get that,” Claude says quietly, putting pieces together carefully in his mind. “What I don’t get is why.”

“Perhaps,” Dimitri says, hesitant, “you might consider, if it pleases you…”

“Dimitri,” Claude says, his voice muffled against Dimitri’s own chest.

“Dedue would say it better,” Dimitri insists, letting his hand roam along Claude’s back. The pads of his fingers trace a raised pattern of scarring along his shoulder blades. Magefire at his back, burning through his armor and melting it to his skin, Claude recalls. That had been a critical hit, one that had almost killed him. Teach had been the one to patch him up from that. “We wondered if you might be inclined to, um, to… ugh.”

“Just say it plainly.” Claude tries not to let worry bite at him. Relaxed from the drink, still turned on from being skin-to-skin with Dimitri, it’s easier to keep calm, to hold faith. Dimitri is nervous because this is _important_ to him, whatever it is. So Claude keeps his grip on himself strong, fights himself to give Dimitri the reins for now.

“Dedue finds you lovely as well,” Dimitri exclaims, as if he’s just discovered it. “He has admired you, also, since we all attended school, of course.” Claude can hear his heart. It’s going a million beats a minute. “We wondered if you might be inclined, at your own leisure, to enjoy our company in, inwhateverconfigurationyoufoundpleasing.”

Oh.

_Oh_.

Claude works through that slowly. Dedue and Dimitri, Claude and Dimitri, Claude and…. Dedue and Dimitri? So Dedue knew of Claude’s feelings for Dimitri and had sent him ahead as a vanguard, to make the advance on the field and capture the ground before any further troops were mobilized.

‘ _You’re a man after my own heart_ ,’ he’d said to Dedue, and Dedue had looked so _pleased_. He’d never suspected that Dedue felt that way about him, which suddenly seems stupid. The bed had been lovingly made, piled in not just warmth but sensuality, laden heavy with Dedue’s attentions and care. And that fur-lined robe… How interesting. Claude revels in the sensation of having been wrong, but pleasantly so. He doesn’t get that very often. Best to _really_ appreciate it.

“Not just like that, of course,” Dimitri says, his voice having dropped so suddenly in pitch that it’s almost like another person is talking. It’s clear that he’s calmed down considerably, having dropped the critical message he’d expected another to have to deliver. “Not just in bed, I mean. It isn’t like that. Dedue is an excellent cook, and I cannot truly appreciate his efforts, but I know you enjoyed his dishes in the past, and so… I am a fair shake at board games, too, Claude, if you would like to…”

Claude turns his head up and kisses at the only spot he can reach on Dimitri’s face, which happens to be the underside of his jaw. It pauses Dimitri’s rambling, which is exactly the effect he was going for.

“Okay,” he says. A part of him is screaming, rattling at his bones, scraping at his ribs angrily with vicious claws. _You don’t know what you’re agreeing to_ , it says. _Find out more information. You can’t trust this. What’s their angle?_

But if he doesn’t give a little, if he doesn’t open himself up, there won’t be anything to find out. There won’t be more information. There will just be Dimitri and Dedue, and there will be Claude, and that will be that. Nothing will have been gained, nothing will have been learned. It will have been a wasted effort on everybody’s part.

“Okay,” he says again, stretching out his hands to reach for Dimitri’s head. Dimitri closes his eye, lowering his head somewhat to better allow Claude to run his fingers through his hair.

“I am glad,” Dimitri says, sighing deeply in pleasure or relief or perhaps both. “We- when you come to us, we would have you. I’m glad I haven’t scandalized you.”

“It’s fine. I’m an unconventional kind of fellow,” Claude says, shifting to roll onto his back again, giving himself a little space. “And anyway, trust me, I’ve received much more elaborate propositions.”

“Don’t tell me about them,” Dimitri says, reaching across to pet at Claude’s chest, his fingers finding a nipple gone tight from the chill of the sheets where Claude has rolled. He runs the pads of his fingers across it gently, as if brushing the furled bud of a delicate flower. There’s another scar right below, one from a javelin that had gone almost entirely through his armor. Dimitri himself might have been the one to fling it. “I may become jealous.”

“Jealous?” Claude laughs, reaching up to run his hands over Dimitri’s forearm. “You have me in bed right now. There’s nothing to be jealous of.”

“I suppose,” Dimitri says, though it’s clear he doesn’t believe him. “We never did discuss, Claude, if you wanted to take or be taken. Now is as good a time as any, before we get carried away again.”

“Oh yeah,” he says, surprised. He’d thought Dimitri had decided that when he’d backed him onto the bed, but that’s foolish of him, isn’t it? They’d said they would decide later, and Dimitri has always been a man of his word, sometimes to a fault. “Now that you mention it, what do you prefer?” Dimitri moves his hand to his other nipple, trailing his fingers over Claude’s skin reverently as he goes. Claude rolls his hips against nothing, lying back against the pillows to watch Dimitri in the lowering light of the fire.

“Usually Dedue takes me,” Dimitri says cautiously. “Because of my size, I mean.”

“Your size?” Heat collects in Claude’s belly at the mental image: Dedue bending Dimitri over, or draped along his back, perhaps riding between his spread legs, and through all of it, Dimitri surrendered entirely to pleasure. “You mean…” He looks down between them into the blackness of the covers. He’d been too busy rutting with Dimitri to actually pay attention to exact measurements, but now that the topic has come up, he finds himself deathly curious.

“Yes,” Dimitri says, blushing so hard that his ears start to turn pink.

“I don’t suppose you mind,” Claude says, flashing a smile, arcing his chest up into Dimitri’s hands encouragingly, “if I put my hands on the goods in question?”

“By all means,” Dimitri breathes, turning to loom over Claude a bit again. He occupies his mouth with Claude’s left nipple, and doesn’t _that_ feel good. Claude sighs against the pillows, dreamily trails his fingers over Dimitri’s head and neck and shoulders, and finds that indeed, the idea of having more of this, perhaps satiation when he’d expected starvation rations, is warming indeed.

But he’s never been the type to lie about, especially not when there’s a discovery to be made. Keeping his goal firmly in mind despite Dimitri’s attentions, Claude trails his hands down Dimitri’s body as slowly as he can manage. He tries not to rush, tries not to let his curiosity make him seem careless, but with a lead-in like that how can a man not be deadly curious? It had felt large when he’d sat on it, but it hadn’t looked disproportionate on him as he’d climbed onto the bed, had it? That doesn’t say much, though. Dimitri is made on scale with legends, not men.

Only one way to find out.

There’s a point where Claude has reached all of Dimitri he can in their current arrangement. He urges Dimitri up with his palms on his belly, at his sides, and tries not to let Dimitri’s impatient whine go to his head. With a hand in his hair to steer him, though, Dimitri is more than happy to turn his attentions to Claude’s neck once more. He keeps his lips and teeth light now, though, clearly mindful of Claude’s earlier objection.

With Dimitri looming over him once more, Claude can finally skim his palms below Dimitri’s belly. He pets the curls he finds above his goal, then takes Dimitri’s cock in hand.

Dimitri gasps. His mouth is very wet at the soft skin underneath Claude’s ear.

Claude lets his attention focus on the weight of Dimitri’s prick, the heat of it, the silky slide of skin over the rigidness underneath. He spreads his fingers and finds that he can just barely get them around Dimitri, pumps his grip on him up and down and finds that he’s quite a reach, a motion that requires a little elbow instead of just the usual wrist.

In short: he’s huge.

Claude laughs, unable to contain his astonishment even as he keeps his hand moving, his grip firm but not deathly so. “How do you fit this in your pants?”

Dimitri groans into his ear, seemingly unable to say much at all when Claude is actively jerking him off.

Claude sets himself to work with interest, seeing which motions of the wrist bring him most undone, which steady Dimitri. When he brings his other hand down to help Dimitri moans, low and breathy, and when he slides his fingers back to toy with the silken purse of his balls Dimitri gives a strangled cry and fucks his hips down hard to pin Claude against him, against the bed, again.

“Easy there, your royalness,” Claude huffs, amused, letting his pace stay steady and slow. “Easy. We have all night.”

“Claude,” Dimitri growls, his voice dropped so low it’s in the earth itself, rumbling like an earthquake through both of their bodies. “Claude, Claude,” he repeats, and then he falls into a chant, his mouth falling open and his breath coming faster as Claude speeds up and flicks his wrist on the pull so the sensitive, plush head of Dimitri’s cock butts at the cup of his furled palm.

Dimitri grows restless, his eye squeezed shut. His hands fist in the bedsheets and his belly goes taut, his thighs begin to tremble, and Claude

lets go.

The cry Dimitri lets out is all astonishment until it turns, at the end, into a feral snarl.

“You want to be taken, Dimitri?” Claude asks, feeling strangely like it’s a waste now that he says it. He’d psyched himself up for nothing, and isn’t it telling that he’s thinking of it like that. He fishes up Dimitri’s earlier words up out of his mind, tries to remember when in fact the last time he chose to do something with no sense of a larger goal looming behind it _was_.

“I never said that,” Dimitri seethes, clearly trying to maintain control of himself. He’s gone very still like a bird about to take flight, a wyvern about to flash teeth. “Only that I am accustomed to it.”

“You want to take me, Dimitri?” Claude asks, his tone much, much more casual than is correct in the circumstances. He finds he’s enjoying Dimitri’s frustration, enjoying the aggressive response his course correction has elicited.

“I would like to,” Dimitri growls, rising up on his hands but not his knees, his eye flashing with intensity. “I would enjoy that very much.”

“I think you should convince me,” Claude tells him, tilting his head and seeing that Dimitri’s gaze flies to his throat, to the mark that’s surely lurid as a fresh-ripened rose on his skin. “Tell me why you want to. You may be a man of action, Dimitri, but you know me. I love _words_. So give me some.”

Dimitri surges down, grabbing Claude’s hair in a fist to pull his head to one side, his mouth flying to Claude’s ear. Claude grunts, feels tears collect at the corners of his eyes, but fuck, it’s so good. It’s hot as hell. He’s the one that’s done this to Dimitri, _he’s_ the one that’s shattered through his rigid manners and self-controlled reach for gentleness. Claude is the one that’s broken him back down to his animalistic core.

“You remind me of a willow branch sometimes,” Dimitri says, which is so unexpectedly poetic that Claude feels heat rising to his cheeks. “I’d enjoy bending you under me very much. Seeing how much you can bend,” he pauses to close his teeth on the tender lobe of Claude’s ear, “how much you can take of me.” He shifts his weight and Claude lets him, lets him part his legs with a knee and slot himself broad and heavy between them. “I want you to ride me. I want to see you saddle-sore from me the next morning. I want you to think of me all tomorrow at the table, sitting there across from Dedue and myself. I want Dedue to see you wince and know what I did to you. I want others to see it and wonder.”

Honestly, Claude is aghast. He’d never expected to hear such erotic filth spilling from Dimitri’s lips of all people, and the contrast, as always, is what gets him: he feels like his face is on fire. He finds himself trembling, this time not from the cold. He doesn’t know what to do with this, because while he’s hardly a wilting virgin himself, his couplings have never, never been as deeply charged with this boiling passion that comes so naturally to Dimitri. If Claude is a willow, Dimitri might as well be lava, consuming everything in its path and hissing as it claims anything it wants, absolutely anything.

“Bite me again,” Claude says, his voice cracked as his heart, “just like before, Dimitri, just make sure it can’t be seen, but do anything, anything you want, fuck-“

He does. Claude struggles against him just like before, but this time they both know the rules to the game and so Dimitri doesn’t let up, just presses down and closer, rubbing his cock between their bodies and against Claude’s own. He lays a match against Claude’s neck, a garnet to twin the sapphire he’s laid into Claude’s flesh, and Claude cries out and pulls at his hair, claws at his back, finds incredible satisfaction in the fact that there’s nothing he can do, nothing at all, to get free of this.

Dimitri next lays his teeth on Claude’s throat, high enough to be seen but gentle enough not to mark. The reminder of Dimitri’s control is reassurance amidst savagery. Claude seizes on that like a man reaching for a float in a shipwreck, holds it tight to him and uses it as motivation to prize his own resistance away, peel his fingers off agonizingly, one-by-one, from the reins of the situation.

He feels Dimitri’s hands fly down to cup his ass and squeeze, flexes as he’s learned Dimitri enjoys. Dimitri cups his ass in one hand and lifts him up, slides his other hand between Claude’s legs to tease at his balls, to fondle at the smoothness between his thighs.

“I forgot,” Dimitri says, brow furrowing, “that Almyrans take their hair off. Strange.”

“You guys are hairy,” Claude objects, breathing hard. “It’s strange to leave it on.”

They chuckle at each other, fallen into easy tandem again finally, and Dimitri dives back down into Claude with relish.

It isn’t long before they’re rutting again, Dimitri showing no signs of fatigue despite the fact that he’s still got Claude cupped in his hands, pressed up against him captive in the dark warmth of their blankets. Claude doesn’t think much about it, though he does get tired of hanging there; he uses his thighs and his knees to find Dimitri’s hips and hangs on like he would on wyvernback in the midst of a roll or a dive, relishing the flex of muscle, the effort it takes for them to make contact.

Clearly Dimitri likes _that:_ he releases Claude to bring his hands up and capture his face, kissing him lightly in a barrage before pulling his hair and sliding an arm under his shoulders. The position makes him arch even more than before, makes Claude gasp when his nipples, now painted sensitive by the brush of Dimitri’s tongue, rub at his chest.

The hand in his hair tightens again, so Claude parts his lips in anticipation; when nothing happens he makes a confused noise, forces his gaze to focus.

“You’re incredible,” Dimitri tells him, gaze fixed on his face. “Already you’re willing to open for me.”

Before Claude can become self-conscious Dimitri is on his mouth again, kissing him with forcefully languid satisfaction. He doesn’t let Claude close his lips, keeps on kissing him and kissing him, letting their tongues caress and intertwine until Claude feels like this is all he knows, just Dimitri above him and Dimitri below him and Dimitri in him, on him. His world narrows to the points of contact their bodies are making, and because of that, Claude knows with violent certainty that it’s not _enough_.

“Dimitri,” Claude says, jerking his head away despite the hold on his hair. Dimitri draws his mouth up his jaw, teeth scraping at his beard. “I need you. Come on, find me some oil. I’ll open myself up,” he offers, clenching tight against Dimitri’s flanks because he can feel it before it happens: he rolls.

Riding Dimitri is easier than riding any wyvern in battle, and so Claude of course stays seated where he is. He’s the one pinning Dimitri now, and he understands suddenly why Dimitri kept drawing back to look at him, because Dimitri is _beautiful_ laid out like this under him.

The fire is rolling down into its own bed, cozied there by a thick stack of wood they’d put on before they started drinking. As it flickers down into restfulness the light has turned dim, red, and its in that light that Claude rolls his head on his neck to chase any stiffness away and swallows down the sight before him in sticky, wet gulps.

Claude has the blankets at his shoulders, bracketing him warmly on either side. The sudden rush of cold air has blunted Dimitri’s enthusiasm absolutely none; he lies there with his teeth half-bared and his one eye burning double-bright, his chest glossy with sweat and flushed, his nipples drawn tight from the chill and his belly rocking up and down with the intensity of his breathing. His cock rises between Claude’s legs, lined up against his own, and it takes every ounce of his willpower not to slide down his body and put his mouth on Dimitri, get him off like this while he stares at Claude with a moon-feral light in his eyes and his hands searching, one reaching under the pillows and one reaching desperately for Claude.

He flies into that hand like a falcon, eager for Dimitri to cinch his jesses tight and keep him close again.

“It’s here somewhere,” Dimitri mutters distractedly, tipping his face up into the wet, open-mouthed kisses Claude is decorating his face, his chest, his shoulders with. He licks the salt from Dimitri’s skin, polishes the swell of a bicep as his forearm vanishes into the pillows, and scrapes his teeth over the flex of a tendon. He feels like he wants to devour Dimitri, wants to swallow him down before Dimitri snaps him up in his own ferocious maw.

“Give it to me,” Claude says imperiously, tilting his head up and his eyes down. Dimitri blows out a heavy breath through his nose at the sight, eye flaring wide and blank with desire. Slowly he pulls a little glass jar out from some mysterious part of the bed.

Dedue had been _very_ certain of himself, or at least, of Dimitri, Claude notes, and allows himself to smile toothily in acknowledgement of a trap well-sprung.

He unscrews the jar and gives it a sniff, finds the contents pleasantly herbal without any scents that indicate it might not be something he wants to press up inside himself. Dimitri rolls his hips up, reaches out, but now Claude is on top, now Claude is riding him as he’d wished, and Claude has always expected obedience from his mount. Perhaps Dimitri hadn’t realized that. Claude will help him to understand.

“Down,” he says, expression going aloofly amused, the smile of the sun as it sets over a day well done. “Hands at your sides. I’ll tell you when you can touch me again. Not a finger on me before then, Dimitri.”

“Claude,” Dimitri objects, but he swallows further protest when Claude simply raises a brow in response.

“It’s imperative that you stay very still,” Claude tells him, rising up on his knees. He sets the jar down on his belly, enjoying the little flinch of muscle that garners. The glass is, after all, chilly.

“And what if I don’t?” Dimitri asks, as Claude expected he would.

“Then the oil will spill,” Claude says, spreading a hand and gesturing gracefully to it. Dimitri blinks, processing. “I refuse to sleep in a bed filled with spilled oil, of course. I’m sure Dedue would be terribly disappointed as well.”

Dimitri breathes carefully, eye fixed on the jar positioned just so over his navel.

“Don’t worry,” Claude tells him, rolling his shoulders, arching his back, flexing his glutes to press his cock forward and wring his thighs tight. Dimitri’s mouth falls open at the sight, his tongue sliding out to polish at his his lower lip. “I’ll prepare myself to satisfaction.”

This feels right. This feels good. This feels natural, feels like the fluid exchange of power that _should_ occur between them both.

His words have made Dimitri fall still, have tamed the beast and stilled its fangs. Claude feels the arousal of that thought so keenly that he gives a jerk, a shudder, and a brilliant little pinprick of wetness beads at the tip of his cock. Reaching out with deliberately torturous slowness, Claude dips a finger in the oil. He brings it to his chest first, rubbing it over one nipple and then the next, smearing the slick in the hollow of his throat, up the line of his neck, smearing it along the underside of his jaw. He hopes Dimitri is imagining that it isn’t oil he’s painted in; judging by the baring of his teeth and the rough grab Dimitri makes for the sheets, he is.

Claude takes another finger of oil and this time he does reach back, slides it over the smooth skin around his entrance. He’s fingered himself before, of course, in private. He had a few partners back in his time in the Alliance, after school, who took him. This isn’t new territory, just untrodden ground for several years now. He’ll get back into the rhythm of it easily, as easily as finding the new sweet spot on a favored bow restrung.

He thinks about taking his cock in hand and working himself while he does this but discards the idea. He wants Dimitri to see everything on his face, wants him to wish that it was _him_ making Claude pull those faces. He wants to see the lust searing fierce in Dimitri’s wild eye. He doesn’t want any distractions, not for either of them.

So Claude takes a deep breath and presses his finger up. Brows knitting, he works himself open slowly. He’s tight even to his own hand, enough so that he finds himself swallowing and panting for air at just one finger. Perhaps he’s bitten off more than he can chew here.

He’s made worse mistakes, really.

“Claude,” Dimitri says. He’s trembling under his thighs, his erection weeping precome that beads at his tip, catches at the rim of his head, paints his cock red in the dying light of the fire, paints his belly where the precome falls in orange. “Oh, Claude. You’re so beautiful. For me, even. It’s incredible.”

“I know,” Claude preens, pulling his finger out of himself to catch more oil, this time on two fingers, and press back into himself. He grunts, swallowing, rolls his shoulders and shifts his hips. “I’m worth waiting for.”

“I wish I could help you,” Dimitri says plaintively.

“You can only watch,” Claude says sternly, frowning down at him. “Don’t you dare lift your hands from the bed.”

“I won’t,” Dimitri replies, clenching his jaw for a moment, clearly tormented, though by the idea of disobeying or by the demanding nature of his job Claude couldn’t say. “I want to, though. I love feeling your thighs in my hands.”

Claude snorts out a little laugh. “I bet you do. I bet you loved feeling my cock against yours too, hm?”

“I am enjoying _this_ ,” Dimitri says with abrupt, stilted intensity.

“You should,” Claude says, and finds that his two fingers move easily in him now. Hm. Dimitri is a savvy bedmate, he acknowledges. Distracting Claude from his task had let him relax against his own intrusion much more easily than if he’d simply remained in worshipful silence. “I am too,” he acknowledges, curling his fingers in himself and letting out a slow breath at the feeling.

He catches his bottom lip between his teeth and worries it briefly. A return to the jar, still resting steadily on Dimitri’s tense-wound stomach, and then back between his legs again: three fingers, and his mouth falls open at the stretch.

“Tell me what else you like,” Claude presses, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathes through opening himself further. “What do you want, when you have me again?”

“I want,” Dimitri says, and he’s so overcome with the intensity of the image in his mind, with the power of the vision Claude makes in front of him, that he has to halt and pause and try again: “I’ll press you in half if you can make the stretch, put your legs up over my shoulders.”

“Oh, I can manage that all right.” Claude breathes through his nose for a moment, then starts to work his fingers in and out of himself.

“I’ll put your back to the bed and my back into you, Claude,” Dimitri says, shuddering. “I’ll make good on my promise to you.”

“Interesting,” Claude says, riding his fingers a little, starting to enjoy the stretch instead of simply tolerating it. “I do know you’ve always made good on your word, you know.”

He works his fingers in and out of himself, casts an eye down to Dimitri’s cock hanging heavy and ready between them. He should go for four fingers for this particular beast. If he was more practiced, perhaps, he could get away with three, but he isn’t, and so: four.

“How long will you tease me?” Dimitri groans, rubbing his palms on the sheets. He’s been bare for long enough that even he is starting to grow chilly, it seems: his chest is slowly falling into goosebumps here and there. Claude, bared to the cold at his front, is starting to grow cold too, can feel the persistent involuntary shiver from before coming over him, but he knows that there will be no maintaining this control over Dimitri again once they fall down into the black heat of the bedcovers in earnest.

“As long as I want.” Claude snorts, slicking his fingers again and reaching between his own legs once more. “You can tease me as much as you’d like when you’re the one catching my seed.”

“I should simply snatch you up,” Dimitri says, sounding torn between guilt and impatience, “and to hell with the oil jar.”

“Don’t you dare.” Claude presses his fingers into himself and can’t help the little wince he gives. Dimitri, staring intently and ferociously at his face, suddenly gentles and puffs out a shocked breath. “I told you, Dimitri. You’ll touch me when I say you can and not a second before. Do you hear me?”

“… Yes,” he says, with all the roiling force of a thunderstorm a second before it burns fire into the heart of a tree.

“Good,” Claude says, forcing himself to breathe slowly, to rock his fingers in and out of himself gently. “Good. That’s good of you. I’m not ungrateful, you know. I appreciate it.”

“You should,” Dimitri replies faintly, his eye cast down to where Claude’s fingers are vanishing into himself. He’s probably so hard that it hurts by now, if he hadn’t already gotten there before. Dimitri is truly a gentleman, Claude muses, and pulls his fingers from himself with a satisfied noise. 

The fire pops.

“Now?” Claude begs, his eyebrow dipping up and his tone turning sweet, wheedling. It’s a good thing he never understood girls in school, Claude reflects, because otherwise, with a pretty little ask like that, they’d have had half a dozen Blaiddyd bastards underfoot and more on the way.

“No,” Claude says firmly. “Take the oil jar and close it back up again. Put it back.”

“Your expectations of my patience,” Dimitri tells him with a baleful glare, “are awfully generous.”

“Do it.” Claude tips his head to the side, rolling his fingers to spread the oil more evenly along them. “ _Now_ , Dimitri.”

He obeys, but there’s a reticence, a tightly controlled deliberateness to his recapping and replacing of the oil somewhere hidden by the pillows, that tells Claude they have absolutely and completely reached the end of Dimitri’s patience.

Admirable, actually. Claude hadn’t really been sure he would last at all. Hell if he knew what he’d have done if Dimitri called his bluff, though. Claude certainly isn’t in any mood to actually spurn him, spilled oil or no.

“Hold still,” Claude says, tossing his head, when Dimitri returns to lying flat on his back. Dimitri snarls, actually _snarls_ , but that turns very quickly to one of pleasure because Claude has wrapped his oiled fingers along his shaft and is working at him once again.

“Oh,” Dimitri says, his hands flying up to bracket Claude.

“Ah-ah,” Claude says, lifting his hand off his cock.

“ _Claude_ ,” Dimitri half-sobs, lifting an arm to cover his face. He’s biting at his own arm, Claude sees. Spirits above and earth below that’s fucking _hot_ , that he’s allowed Claude to drive him to such madness and still he’s only willing to turn on himself.

“I’ve got you,” Claude reassures him, shifting on his knees to walk forward a little. Dimitri gives a choked cry around his forearm. His cock jumps. “Do you want to watch this?”

“ _Goddess yes_ ,” Dimitri forces out, releasing his arm and half-sitting up. “Claude, Claude. Please. Let me in you. Please. _Please._ ”

A dozen little bastards underfoot, Claude thinks, swallowing heavily, and it might as well be one in his own belly with a bedroom stare like _that_.

Without any further preamble he grabs Dimitri’s prick, positions it carefully, and begins to lower himself. He shifts his hips, walks forward a little more, and suddenly he can feel the burning velvet of Dimitri’s tip at his entrance.

He isn’t made of patience himself, though he’d like others to think so: he bears down slowly, releasing Dimitri’s cock and flinging that hand to rest, slippery with his precome and the oil, on his belly.

Dimitri grits his teeth, bares them, tears at the sheets and fights his own body in half-stilled jumps of muscle. Claude feels his legs shift a little, imagines he might be digging his heels into the bed while still fighting the urge to finish sheathing himself inside.

“You feel,” he says, fixing his eye on the space between them, the space that’s rapidly disappearing, “oh, Claude, you feel _amazing.”_

It’s Claude’s turn to be rendered speechless, because even his four fingers were a pale imitation of this: of Dimitri, burning and pulsing in him, forcing him open between the legs in a way he hasn’t had to do in years. Forcing him open in a way he’s never had to do at all, because this isn’t just a fuck, isn’t just a beautiful tumble: this is Dimitri, his coveted love object of youth, Dimitri, his guilty object of lust in adulthood, Dimitri, polished and deeply ragged on either side of the coin, Dimitri, Dimitri, Dimitri.

“I’m here,” Dimitri says, reaching up but still refraining from touching, and Claude has a moment of confusion before he realizes he’s been chanting his name, letting it drop from his mouth overripe and laden with meaning as if it had fallen straight from the garden of his thoughts. “Claude-“

“Touch me,” he begs, thighs shaking as he continues to sink down, feeling vertigo hit him like it never does no matter how many whirls he has to take in the air to avoid being shot down. “Dimitri, please,” he says, his voice shaking to match his body.

Dimitri sits up and gathers Claude to him urgently, murmuring soft words, gentle words, praises and nonsense phrases and beautiful lovely meaningless things that bring Claude pleasure regardless. He feels safe like this, held in Dimitri's arms, feels warm and protected and indulged. He lets himself drop down further onto Dimitri’s cock, breathes in heavily and relaxes when he feels Dimitri rubbing at his back. He buries his nose in Claude’s hair and inhales tremulously, squeezes Claude tightly enough to huff some of the air from his lungs.

“A little more,” he encourages, which makes Claude whine because he already feels entirely, completely full, and he doesn’t know how to make any more room in himself. “Open yourself up for me, Claude, my handsome, my darling,” he murmurs, which hits Claude like a drug: he goes more pliant in his arms yet, curls softer against Dimitri and drops his hips again, again. “Let me in,” he says, kissing at his temple, then moving, shifting at the waist and turning his head to kiss at Claude’s other temple.

“Make me take it,” he agrees, feeling like madness must have taken him to say something like that. “ _Make_ me.”

The room is sinking into crimson from the fire and Claude is sinking into insanity, because Claude wraps his arms around Dimitri’s waist, rests his forehead against his sternum, and lets Dimitri grab at his hips to push him down that final inch, sobbing open-mouthed in heated, pleasant agony as he falls.

His thighs quake and his body clenches, trying to reject Dimitri, but his root is in him now and gravity holds it there. Where gravity doesn’t do the trick Dimitri’s grip on him does: he holds Claude down at the narrowness of his waist against his squirms and struggles, and Claude loves it, loves that he can’t get himself out of this, can’t do anything at all with all the cunning in the world but sit in Dimitri’s lap and adjust to the heady brutal weight of his cock in him.

“Fffuck,” he slurs, loosening his hands from around Dimitri’s waist to scrabble ineffectively at his chest. “You- fuck, you’re too big. Let me off. Let me off!”

“Do you want me to?” Dimitri asks, curiosity in his tone. “I think you like this.”

“I do,” Claude agrees, even as he tries to raise his hips and Dimitri keeps him pressed down to his cock. “Fuck me, I do.” He raises a hand to his face and scrubs at the embarrassed little tears that have sprung up in the corners of his eyes. Dimitri makes a sympathetic noise.

“I want to,” Dimitri says, and again there’s that aura, the apprehension of dark clouds before a strike of lighting, “roll over you now, Claude. Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” he says, pinching at one of Dimitri’s nipples because it’s there. He gives a little jump and his cock does too; Claude moans.

“When we do,” Dimitri warns him, “I’m not letting you up again.”

“Do it,” Claude assents, knowing he’s blushing from his cock to his ears and hoping his skin hides it better than he thinks, “I want it.”

“Even if you beg like you just did,” Dimitri warns him, and Claude can feel the tension in him, can feel how much self-control this final offer of escape is taking, “I won’t let you up. Because I know you’re just playing, now.”

“I am,” he agrees, starting to shift more pleasurably on Dimitri. It still stings, he’s still too big. He’ll probably always be too big. But it’s starting to feel like Claude can at least bear it now.

“If you aren’t,” Dimitri says, casting his eye around thoughtfully, and then he leans in to rest his forehead against Claude’s, “If you aren’t toying with me, Claude, pull off my eyepatch.”

“Smart,” Claude agrees, threading his fingers through Dimitri’s hair and tipping his head up to kiss him. “Yes. I promise.”

“All right,” Dimitri says, waiting for one more agonizing moment, one strung taut between them, before he tucks Claude’s knee up in one hand and rolls them over, letting his weight come down on Claude and the bed come up under.

It feels like falling.

No- it doesn’t feel like falling.

It _is_ falling.

The blankets come down over them, folding them into blackness. Dimitri gets his shoulders under one of Claude’s knees and then the other in a set of military-efficient movements, and then he dives down, presses his hips forward to close the inches that had appeared between them in this different position.

Claude _screams_ , hands flying to Dimitri’s back, scrabbling helplessly for a moment. Like this, with his legs slung askew and his hips pressed up by his own pursuit of pleasure, he has absolutely no traction, no control, no hold on how they move. Dimitri does, and he seems eager to make up for lost time: he’s fucking into Claude like they’ll both die if he doesn’t.

Maybe they will.

Dimitri’s hips jolt forward in eager, quick thrusts, and Claude is so busy trying to seize any sense of control from the situation that he almost misses the first spark of pleasure his movements bring in him. The wet slide of a man between his legs is so long-forgotten as to be foreign, but Dimitri finds that his body knows when the rest of him doesn’t. There’s nothing to do here, he reminds himself, raising a hand to knot at Dimitri’s hair fallen loose at his neck. There’s nothing to fight, nothing to worry about. _Dimitri has you_ , he tells himself, _in more ways than one. Just let him have you._

So he lets his head fall back, baring his throat. He lets his belly clench tighter and his body rock with Dimitri’s thrusts, and he lets Dimitri fold him over further until he’s bent double and they can kiss, or Dimitri can kiss his cheek and Claude can let a litany of words fall from his lips, a list of curses and praise that seems ever-growing. 

Dimitri hoists him up a little more, his thrusts moving from desperate to deliberate, and Claude finds himself dragging his nails down his back and howling. _There_ , he wants to say, but he doesn’t need to, because Dimitri is evenly matching his motions, is falling in perfect synchronization, and he knows without being told: he holds Claude still, perfectly, and he slides home.

Somebody is babbling, saying things that don’t make sense, and Claude would be curious as to who it is but Dimitri’s perfect cock is in him, striking true with every bed-shaking thrust, and Claude finds that he doesn’t have any room in his brain, none at all, to think about anything but Dimitri, because he’s coming, coming, raking his nails down Claude’s back and bucking and fighting him the whole way, stars and light and darkness searing through his mind and eating up everything inside of himself

until the only thing left is Dimitri.

And then Dimitri, too, is bearing down, pressing feral and wild to fuck into him as quickly as he can, a raw force of passion and finesse refined down into a man almost too perfect for this world. His hands come down to clamp at Claude's hips, his eye slides shut, and his lips part. Claude feels him pulse in him, feels the ragged erosion of Dimitri’s rhythm, and clenches back against him as much as he can. He’s rewarded with a strangled howl and the warm pulse of Dimitri’s finish in him.

They lie still for a moment, breathing heavily, sweat shining on both of their bodies.

Dimitri comes back to himself first and shifts, grabs at the base of himself and pulls out. Claude makes a noise, furrows his brow and unfurrows it.

When Dimitri next collapses down into the bed, breathing heavily, Claude turns and curls into him.

“We should clean up,” Dimitri says, but he sounds just as deliriously tired as Claude feels.

“Stay,” Claude mumbles, twining a leg around one of Dimitri’s. He can feel some of his come sliding down one thigh. Dimitri is right. They really should.

“Mm,” Dimitri replies, and then they’re out.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jesus christ Claude have you ever fucking heard of a safe word BECAUSE DIMITRI HAS and Dedue is VERY disappointed in BOTH of you
> 
> ... Grudgingly respectful of Claude's insane core strength, though.
> 
> Okay, one more chapter after this, I lied, which will be mostly wrapping up a few things.
> 
> Come say hi on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/crownofpins) if you'd like.


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